Telecom systems may be designed to provide certain availability, for example “five nines” or 99.999% availability. Some telecom system components may be duplicated for redundancy, as a single component failure may result in the entire telecom system going down. Components whose failure may impact the entire telecom system include, for example, control cards, power supplies, cooling units, and uplinks. These components may be duplicated for redundancy, thus increasing the system's availability. Line cards may be used for line and link protection and may be duplicated for redundancy as well; however, failure of line cards (depending on configuration) may not impact the entire telecom system. In conventional implementations, the redundant components may consume substantially the same amount of power as actively operating components resulting in increased power consumption. Thus, there is a need to reduce power consumption while still maintaining a high level of availability.